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PART 2 Formal Intellectual Influences In his seminal popular book Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (1991), theologian James H. Cone helpfully declared that Martin Luther King was not an academic theologian, but “a theologian of action, a liberation theologian (in the best sense) whose thinking about God was developed in his efforts to achieve freedom and dignity for black people.”1 King was not only a man of ideas and ideals, but a man of lived or “practiced” ideas during nonviolent direct action demonstrations, primarily in the South, but also in the North.2 Contrary to the claim of some scholars, King was truly a theologian in the best sense. Cone put it in a helpful way: “He did not develop his theology in the classroom, teaching graduate students, or in professional theological societies, reading learned papers to professors of theology. Rather King’s theology was embodied in his life, that is, in what he did and said about justice and love between blacks and whites and about God’s will to realize the American dream, reconciling, as brothers and sisters, the children of former slaves and former slaveholders.”3 And yet, there were formal elements of theology that influenced and were influenced by all that King brought to the theological enterprise. He was in the best sense an organic theologian. After his father’s ugly encounter with a traffic cop, the boy King told Daddy King that he would help him to fight racism. Whether as an adult King 1. James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 123. 2. I borrow the term practiced from Cone, ibid. 3. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America, 123. 67 Jr. actually remembered saying this or not, it is known that he was sensitive to the issue of racism from around the age of six when the white parents of his best friend would no longer allow the two boys to play together because of race. Even at that early age King sensed that racism was wrong, and his parents taught him that it was not to be passively accepted, but resisted with all one’s might. We have seen that the spirit of social protest roots deep in King’s family tree. While his paternal grandparents were known for their violent resistance to certain manifestations of racism, his maternal grandparents favored nonviolent resistance. The spirit of social protest was inherited from both sides of his family. Perhaps because he grew up in the South, King had a deep sense of appreciation for self-defense, a point to be examined in chapter eight. As a boy he was known to defend himself when a fight came to him. Although as he got older he learned to use his mind to avoid fights, we will see that as late as the startup of the Montgomery bus boycott he still adhered to an ethic of self-defense, even to the extent of having armed bodyguards and owning a pistol. By the time King enrolled in seminary in the fall of 1948, he had set for himself two important goals, one of which was to find the most reasonable method for addressing and eradicating racism and related social evils that adversely affected his people. He hoped to do this through the study of theology, philosophy, social philosophy, and ethics. Through his formal study of these areas of thought, he was introduced to a number of ideas that would later be key elements in his theology, social ethics, and philosophy of nonviolent direct action. The primary aim of the two chapters in Part 2 is to examine the relevant ideas of Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr that significantly influenced King’s intellectual development and his commitment to applying the gospel to eradicating racism, economic injustice, and militarism. Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr aided King by providing a formal theological foundation for the social conscience he developed while growing up in the racist Deep South. We will see in chapter eight that Gandhi gave him the method he sought to address and attack racism and other social problems that threatened to destroy his people and the poor. Although King used ideas from each of these to forge his philosophy of nonviolence, what made his doctrine and practice distinct was his insistence on the absolute dignity of human beings as such, and his conviction that reality hinges on a moral foundation. These two convictions are foundational Christian as well as personalist principles...

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